AeroFS - File Sync Without Servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.aerofs.com/ <comment><USER4> I'm using this for about 6 months now. It works exactly like Dropbox, but it doesn't store any data on a central server, so I can use it even for my more sensitive files like my ssh private key.

I have a server at home on which AeroFS is running, so my data generally is available. And if my internet at home is down, usually there's another machine where it's running.

As it's syncing and keeping the local copy, the most current data will be on the machine I'm working on anyways.

The installation feels a bit "heavier" than dropbox which does a better job at staying out of my way, but the advantages of next to unlimited storage and no third-party server are huge for me.

<comment><USER5> I've got one of these NAS devices at home that is always on: <http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=167>

I'd love to see installers made for a few of the NAS devices on the market for this. It would solve the "must have another computer on" thing really well.

<comment><USER6> I've been using AeroFS in headless mode on my NAS as well, and it's worked fine so far (the headless mode itself, I think there were a few bugs in AeroFS).

I'll try it again now, however. If they nail the fundamentals down, it'll replace Dropbox for me.

EDIT: Or do you mean custom NAS OSes? Mine just runs Ubuntu.

<comment><USER5> QNAP have some packaging stuff of their own, and make it simple to one-click install and keep it updated.

<http://www.qnap.com/QPKG.asp>

I used to build my own SqueezeBox Server for years from source, but after a while I just wanted it reasonably up to date, in a stable build, without the hassle. I'd hope that AeroFS would be packaged in the same way so it's not another thing on my list of things to maintain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> AeroFS isn't as refined as Dropbox, but the flexibility of cross-computer sync makes it pretty ideal for large media storage. I have almost 200GB of photos, and dropbox really wasn't an option for that. They release updates to the product every few weeks, so it's getting better.

Gripes: 1- It's a lot chattier than dropbox. This could be a tradeoff for being a distributed protocol, but it's something that dropbox seemed to improve in over time as well. 2- Iffy compatibility with Lion: I often get "AeroFS is already running" messages. 3- They recently added the needed ability to change the location of the AeroFS Library, but I'd love to modify the location of each Share in the Library. 4- This is likely beyond the project's scope, but I'd love to be able to access my files without syncing in a pinch. 5- Better activity view: Dropbox's menu icon changes to indicate activity. I find this useful, so I can shut it off if my connection is slow. AeroFS's icon doesn't change, and to view activity, you need to open Preferences.

Positives: 1- Unrestricted size, great for large media libraries 2- Seems very fast, especially over LAN 3- I love how you can set up multiple shares - <USER2> for a workgroup, one for personal projects, and one for photos, and you can sync those among any computers you want. 4- It makes offsite backup effortless 5- Auto-updates are great

<comment><USER8> Hey Bryan, Your gripes haven't fallen on deaf ears :) The chatty protocol feedback we've heard a few times, and we're doing our best to optimize it. The Lion issues we'll investigate ASAP.

As for #3, That's actually a highly requested feature (see <http://ae.ro/iUi6OZ>), so it's pretty high on our to do list

#4. We've thought about this for a while, not really sure yet how we will implement it though.

#5. Working on that, as well, no ETA yet though :)

<comment><USER6> Regarding #3 (and probably #4), make sure they don't clutter your default UI (maybe hide them behind a small button in preferences). There's a reason why Dropbox is so popular, and it's because it's just a folder that syncs. You might want to preserve that simplicity as much as you can in AeroFS too.

<comment><USER9> Since up votes are hidden now, just want to make it clear that I +1 this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using the beta for several months now and it has worked great across a variety of Windows and Mac machines.

For things like music and photos where I have 40+GB of accumulated bits it feels a better option than a straight cloud based system like DropBox or JungleDisk (which I also use, but for a smaller amount of stuff).

I have a number of machines with many GB of spare disk space, so rather than paying monthly storage fees for back up, I can just use this to replicate rarely changing content. Since machines on the local network sync at LAN speeds it is also very fast in the usual case.

<comment><USER11> >Since machines on the local network sync at LAN speeds it is also very fast in the usual case.

On a LAN, I don't really see the advantages over something like FreeFileSync, which is GPL'd.

Over the 'net, locating the machine and performing NAT traversal can be useful, though, especially for people behind ISP NAT.

<comment><USER12> "On a LAN, I don't really see the advantages over something like FreeFileSync, which is GPL'd."

AeroFS is not a 'copy diffs' tool, it's like dropbox - changes are propagated instantly and automatically, in all directions. Yes you can run a cron job syncing every 2 minutes or whatever but that still doesn't do syncs to many machines, it means you need to keep the machine with the cron job always on etc. So no, AeroFS/Dropbox are not like FreeFileSync or Cobian Backup or rsync or SyncToy or anything like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good morning everyone, I'm one of the co-founders of AeroFS. I'll be here the rest of the day answering questions as they come up, if anyone has them. Otherwise, feel free to either chat with me on the website, and/or through firstname.lastname@example.com :-)

<comment><USER12> I got an invite yesterday and I'm trying it out, one thing you could make more clear on the website is for what purposes it does connect to the central server. I had to enter a username/password so it must be doing some communication with your servers, no? Otherwise, how does it find other computers that are connected to the account? And if your service goes away, would I be unable to add new machines to my 'sync network'?

<comment><USER8> This actually used to be such a common question that we wrote a support article about it :) See <http://ae.ro/jnqNyw> for more info

(edit: wrong link before, my bad)

<comment><USER12> Sorry, didn't look hard enough then, thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was using this for awhile but the sync algorithm is retarded. It spent all of its time syncing gigs of meta data and saturating my upload rate. Also be prepared to make room for the 100mb+ process as it does not seem to care about memory efficiency.

I guess I'm still stuck with rsync and cronjobs until they work out the issues.

<comment><USER14> Indeed. Prepare to wait hours for newly added files to be synced, prepare for immense memory footprints, prepare for the worst conflict resolution you've ever seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One day, I will love AeroFS. But that day is not yet today: AeroFS does not preserve file modification times across clients, which kills it for me.

On the bright side, I finally got around to setting up Unison + cron to keep files in sync between my MacBook Air and my MacBook Pro, and it's working quite well. I'd highly recommend it to anyone facing a similar challenge.

<comment><USER16> I had read awhile back that Unison does not preserve HFS+'s extended attributes. Has that changed in a recent version?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This sounds very similar to Microsoft's LiveMesh. Besides that fact that it's not Microsoft, what are the big differences in functionality or usability (or is it totally different)?

<comment><USER18> This is exactly what I use Live Mesh for. I sync 10s of gigs of photos between remote PCs with it.

The only thing I don't like about Live Mesh is that it's very difficult to tell what it's transferring and how long it's taking. It works, but I wouldn't be able to tell you "it'll be another 20 minutes before it's done".

How does AeroFS stack up here?

<comment><USER19> There's a window with a list of current transfers with progress, speed and an ETA per transfer, but no global ETA (yet).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This looks very interesting, but the it's a bit difficult to figure out what it actually is from the website. My impression is that it's like a more featureful take on Unison ("two-way rsync" iirc) with a central server to facilitate NAT traversal.

I suppose they probably haven't figured out their eventual pricing model, but I'd certainly pay a few bucks a month just for coordinating NAT traversal, papering over dynamic IPs and a web interface to set sync policy. For the most part, when my computers are sync'd peer-to-peer, I really don't need or want a copy of my data in the cloud -- my boxes _are_ the cloud. That means that their typical incremental cost per user would be practically zero.

<comment><USER21> it looks like they ultimately will charge for cloud backup (just like dropbox). As you note, the incremental cost of user is zero, so they don't incur a cost by distributing lots of client applications (unlike dropbox, who incurs costs for free customers that use the <2GB plan). it will be interesting to see if dropbox responds. I like the model aerofs proposes. I'm a dropbox user but I use it entirely for the file syncing across three machines - I've only once used the web access to my files (i.e. only once used the cloud storage that aerofs would not provide). If AeroFS has the same usability as dropbox, I would switch to get more storage for free.

<comment><USER22> I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned the lack of a web interface. I've been using AeroFS and Dropbox heavily but haven't felt that I'm at the point where I could give either one up completely. Dropbox is too costly for syncing everything on my drives and I'd prefer not to have sensitive documents on someone else's server.

But, AeroFS requires a client installation and sync to get any access. I've used the Dropbox web interface and iPhone app numerous times to look up a file or reference when I was away from the office. Sure, I could set up a web interface on my desktop as an alternative, but that's not end-user simple. It's also a problem in that, at least on OSX, changes made my system-level processes (such as file sharing) don't always register as modification in the File System Event Database, and thus don't get synced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Beautiful homepage but there is an extra word in the paragraph "Unlimited Storage": "AeroFS lets you can sync all the data"

Also I don't fully understand the product from just the first page. Who is your target audience?

<comment><USER24> The "unlimited storage" thing threw me. If I understand it correctly, it's limited by the free storage I have to use.

"Your computer quite possibly has hundreds of gigabytes of space..." actually, no. Yes, I have a desktop with hundreds of GB free, but my laptop fights with me every day to keep 10-20 GB free. In that case, I think a network file share makes more sense.

Aside from the confusion marketing, I like it. Definitely looks like a potentially nice, secure Dropbox replacement.

<comment><USER25> It is unlimited, as they do not place a limit on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I see it more suitable for techies than normals. For instance I can't imagine explaining to my wife or sister that their files won't sync and they can lose something if the other machine went offline but when it came back they have already switched off the first one :(

<comment><USER19> Yes that one can be tough to explain, especially after the Dropbox "magic". Still it's a very valid use case that clearly highlights the tradeoff between _"in the cloud, so always available, but at a monetary and potentially privacy price"_ and _"not in the cloud, so as unrestricted free and secure as you make it, but needs a reachable peer"_.

It's not as fire-and-forget as Dropbox so I don't see everyone using AeroFS, but there are quite a bunch of non-techies that can get it and could be very interested in such features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there a command-line client? I'd like to install that on a server via ssh and use it as a middle-man storage so I don't have to always have at least 2 computers running to sync.

<comment><USER6> There is, yes. There's also a headless daemon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I guess I'm just old school, but my solution to this problem has been a 250 GB external drive + CVS for all my files. I've been doing it for years and it works great. Every time I leave a machine, it's just 'cvs commit -m "Leaving home/work/library/Starbucks"'. Once you get past the perverse feeling of checking your music library into CVS, it works fine.

<comment><USER29> I'm curious; why CVS instead of something nicer like git (or mercurial, which has good windows support)?

<comment><USER28> My sibling commenter is giving me too much credit - I started before git came along, so it was either CVS or SVN. I wanted to be able to kill directories directly from the repository, so CVS it was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> AeroFS looks like an interesting service, I remember reading the earlier entry about them and their blog (i think it was on posterous at the time).

It reminded me of two projects --

Wuala which allowed seemless syncing between machines, as well as donating storage to gain the benefit of "cloud storage" for your files. They eventually went the route of offering storage space and got bought by Lacie.

The second is much older (mid/earlyish 90s) that had the same p2p based donate space on your drive and fragments of your files will be stored on other connected machines.

The sharing and other similar features will be interesting to see how those are implemented.

<comment><USER31> _The second is much older (mid/earlyish 90s) that had the same p2p based donate space on your drive and fragments of your files will be stored on other connected machines._

I think you are thinking of MojoNation, which died and forked off several sub- projects/companies based on its original codebase: Allmydata was just like Wuala but five or six years earlier that never gained any traction and now lives on in the Tahoe-LAFS project, and BitTorrent (which you have probably heard of...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Our whole company has been using AeroFS exclusively for our network drives, and it's worked extremely well! It's great because we can share files of any size, and it seamlessly updates between all machines.

<comment><USER7> Us as well. We have it installed on a central mac mini, and each client has a copy. It's a lot better than DropBox's current team solution, which forces you to dump your personal dropbox account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anyone know if it supports lazy syncing? i.e. if I have a big beefy server with a couple hundred gigs of media, and I would like to be able to access individual files occasionally from my small laptop, am I forced to sync everything over because the folder is shared?

<comment><USER7> AFAIK, right now, this is not supported. You can have multiple shares/folders though, so it's closer to this than say, Dropbox.

<comment><USER8> Bryan is right. Right now we support selectively syncing independent shares. So if you had a "music" library, and a "workgroup" library, you could sync either the music library, or the workgroup library, or both (or neither), but that's as fine granularity as we allow today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I am using it as well ... really fast & light weight :) \- If you are in work environment, updates happen almost real time across your team.

Only if they had option to have different path for each libraries.

<comment><USER35> I would like to try it out, but it looks like somebody has to invite me. Could you maybe do that? Thanks in advance! (daniel.kempkens[ät]gmail.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I see they have a Linux version. Is it Open Source?

<comment><USER37> The biggest problem I have with centralized servers in the first place is that I don't trust my data with them. If it was decentralized and open source, that's an app I could see myself using.

Closed source = no good for privacy.

<comment><USER22> I think that AeroFS only uses central servers to identify the IP addresses of participating hosts and negotiate a connection. AFAIK, the actual data flows directly peer to peer. So, even a malicious employee or government snoop would only know the IP of swarm participants. Presumably you'd still need to intercept and crack any encryption between nodes.

<comment><USER37> That's not the problem, the app being closed source and being able to do whatever it wants with my data is the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Echoing joelthelion, I wonder: is this just a service selling you access to Tahoe-LAFS? If so, wouldn't it make more sense to just install Tahoe yourself instead of paying them and worrying about whether their version of the code is less secure than the publicly audited version?

(Actually, even if not. Why would you pay someone to have access to your own files on your own computer?)

<comment><USER39> _is this just a service selling you access to Tahoe-LAFS?_

No. Tahoe-LAFS is very different (access is only over HTTP for a start)

 _Why would you pay someone to have access to your own files on your own computer?_

Ignoring the whole free-to-use-on-your-computer-but-we'll-sell-you-cloud- backup model, there is always the old fashioned you-pay-us-for-the-software model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> love it, love it, love it. Please don't go out of business :) Related to going out of business - I'd like to start paying something monthly to support, please add that option

</comment><comment><USER41> git annex might be of interest to some:

<http://git-annex.branchable.com/>

[http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2011.html#Handling_my_music_c...](http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2011.html#Handling_my_music_collection_with_git- annex)

</comment><comment><USER42> There's a nice big "Download Now" button that leads to a "Sign Up for an Invite" page that says "as soon as we can". That button causes the expectation that I would download something immediately so it's disappointing and discourteous when that's not the case.

</comment><comment><USER43> I can't figure out if at allows seeding backups.

E.g. - backing up your first massive backup locally using an external drive, then moving it physically offsite and beginning the sync online.

That seems like a fantastic feature to me. That way, instead of having - say - a photo library on each of my laptops - I can have a single photo library at a remote location on an external hard drive that's constantly synched with new photos, without the need to upload hundreds of GB in an initial seed.

Plus - of course - being able to access any of my photos from anywhere.

Crashplan offers something similar - but it's purely a backup solution - <USER3> doesn't make your files "cloud-like" accessible.

<comment><USER7> I believe so. My photos on two drives were about 3 months out of sync and and it seemed to only sync those that were missing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Theory is great, BUT if it isn't storing anything, then at least one device/computer with an up-to-date version of the folder must be online at all times. Is that correct? If not how does it sync without storing the data remotely?

<comment><USER45> You sync only when both sides are up.

<comment><USER44> See that seems like a bit of a downside to me, I like being able to pull down things from my Sparkleshare server onto my laptop when I'm out, but I don't have my computer on all the time (Infact, most of the time, when my laptop is on my computer is off and vice-versa). I still think it's a great idea but having some cloud storage is a definate plus.

<comment><USER11> Seems like you could use a decent router with USB storage support ;)

<comment><USER44> Like I say, I use Sparkleshare instead of Dropbox and also have a Drobo for central storage, this isn't something I want to do because I can already do it, I was just pointing out it could be a problem for some people

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell I signed up for this ages ago. I tried it for a while, and then ditched it. IIRC it didn't have support for one of my operating systems at the time. My requirements have changed now, and it's been a while, so I just went to the website to download the app again, and I can't find it anywhere. The download link just goes to an invite page. I still have my credentials, but I can't log in with them, because there is no login form. Or at least it is hidden...

</comment><comment><USER46> It definitely looks cool. I assume when the cloud backup option is avaiailable you can choose what to back up? Can you choose which folders are synched on a folder-by-folder basis (since I don't need my 500GB photo library on my mac laptop, but I do want it on y desktops)? Hopefully there is a version that works on Windows Server 2008/2011? This would kick butt on the mac app store. Invite requested...

<comment><USER4> I'm running this on a Windows Server 2008 (among other things) and it works fine. (update: invites are gone)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I received my invite awhile back but was disappointed to find out they didn't have support for my 64bit Linux box. Since I primarily run Linux, I was a bit disappointed. I'm fully understanding, though, as I know my demographic by no means has any kind of market share. Still, it would be a very nice additional and would be the pre-cursor to me giving AeroFS a shot at home.

</comment><comment><USER48> I have been using this for a while and am waiting for full Amazon S3 support, versioning and backup/upload any file (not just in AeroFS folder). I liked how I was able to talk to the creator the day I installed it. He seemed very optimistic. I see a lot of potential in this but as of right now dropbox has it beat. I am looking forward to more updated (soon!)

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder if it uses Tahoe-LAFS behind the scenes?

</comment><comment><USER50> Not sure I understand how sync works when the same file is being edited from multiple places simultaneously. Who wins? Any pointer appreciated.

Totally unrelated: how do you pronounce aerofs? If I try to say it in French it either comes out as "erofesse" (erotic buttock) or "aerofesse" (flying buttock). That will definitely win points with French-speakers :-)

</comment><comment><USER51> So, what's the business model? You pay for "cloudy" backup space, but otherwise it's free?

</comment><comment><USER52> Can someone send me an invite please? I'd like to try this...

email@example.com

<comment><USER53> i'd like to try it as well if any of your could spare an invite please?

<comment><USER54> I'd also love to try it - if anyone has an extra invite, mind sending one to firstname.lastname@example.com?

<comment><USER55> I'd love an invite too... email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I really want to try this out, but I'm concerned about conflicts or syncing collisions with Dropbox. Has anyone tried a setup with both AeroFS and Dropbox running simultaneously?

</comment><comment><USER57> Hey. What does this give me that I can't get from just having a mercurial repository which has a bunch of clones and each clone pushes to the others when something changes?

<comment><USER58> The other comments are quite explanatory--you should read them. What it gives you is "instant" syncing between multiple computers, and without a centralized online cloud (like Dropbox). So it's a good fit for: non techies who need sync, or situations where you don't want to concern yourself with whether you've synced your repo or not (it does it for you).

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Looks nice but invite only so can't test it, help?! :)

<comment><USER4> next time when begging for invites, do make sure that people can contact you privately via your profile :p

<comment><USER59> yeah forgot i didn't add any contact info :) well if you have any left please send to email@example.com thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Isn't this the same thing as PowerFolder, which has been around a long while?

</comment><comment><USER61> So, it's Dropbox, but the Cloud part is optional?

<comment><USER62> from what I understand, yes. The cloud part is the "upsell" I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I think I missed something... basically it uses P2P instead of a central server that copies my data but doesn't that mean I am sending possibly private data all around the internet to other aero users, though encrypted?

Then isn't that the same situation we had in the DEFCON hacks: what keeps people from recording all your traffic and one fine day when the encryption is not secure anymore, they can simply decrypt it?

<comment><USER64> If you want to share your data over the internet you kinda need to send it out at one time or another. This traffic can always be intercepted and stored for later use.

What is your point exactly?

<comment><USER63> You did not understand my question.

I was talking about the part where people use Aero for their personal backups and syncing their own machines, not about sharing with other people.

With something like dropbox traffic goes between me and their servers and whoever is listening in between there.

The way I understand it, with Aero it will go through P2P even if I am just syncing my own machines since both are likely to be behind some sort of NAT or firewall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Peg-Leg How is this different from Polkast ? (polkast.com)

</comment><comment><USER65> If AeroFS is a big honkin' Java background app, I worry, because I worry about the Java ecosystem itself. Who knows how long Oracle will keep it updated? Will new versions of Java break the AeroFS daemon? And I just hate everything Java (bias showing there).

(I suppose DropBox has the same issue with Python to some extent, but at least Python can be fully embedded in an executable and bypass the system environment questions.)</comment>


Stars wars on telnet! Yes. - <AUTHOR> http://www.blinkenlights.nl/thereg/

<comment><USER2> This is so extremely old and unworthy of Hacker News.

We need a down arrow.

<comment><USER3> You get a down arrow once you get enough karma. You know, so people don't abuse the ability to down vote.

<comment><USER4> Only for comments. Submissions themselves cannot be downmodded.

<comment><USER5> when they're this old, they should be auto-downmodded. the article is 7 years old, and I'm pretty sure blinkenlights.nl is older than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> relevancy should be a light weight factor in any automated filter script.</comment>


Write your first MapReduce program in 20 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/write-your-first-mapreduce-program-in-20-minutes/

<comment><USER2> And here's the equivalent Ruby program. In Ruby it is usually 'collect' and 'inject' instead of 'map' and 'reduce'.

        result = Dir.glob('test?.txt').collect do |file_name|
          File.new(file_name, 'r').read.split(' ').collect do |word|
            word.downcase.tr '.,\'', ''
          end.inject Hash.new(0) do |hash,word|
            hash[word] += 1
            hash
          end
        end.inject do |all,hash|
          (all.keys + hash.keys).uniq.inject Hash.new(0) do |acc,word|
            acc[word] = all[word] + hash[word]
            acc
          end
        end
        p result

Edit: The Python example in the article is better because it merges hashes in the reduce step which facilitates parallelisation.

<comment><USER3> You can also use Enumerable#map and Enumerable#reduce, to use names that match the pattern (and #map is arguably more idiomatic than #collect).

<comment><USER4> I finally got inject() when they added the reduce() alias.

<comment><USER3> The thing that confused me most about #inject was the term 'memo'...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> MRJob is a great way to get off the ground and running with MapReduce:

[http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2010/10/mrjob-distributed- co...](http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2010/10/mrjob-distributed-computing- for-everybody.html)

<https://github.com/Yelp/mrjob>

</comment><comment><USER3> If you really want to try and play with MapReduce on a dataset without going through setting up a Hadoop node (or 4), check out CouchDB. It's designed around MapReduces (though not distributed), and you even get to deal with solving re-reduce problems.

<comment><USER6> BigCouch will let you build indexes in parallel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wrote a little shim that allowed to write me to write Hadoop jobs in Clojure, and had two small test functions that would apply a map / reduce to a test file -- it made development of Hadoop jobs a bit easier. See: [https://github.com/brool/hadoop- shim/blob/master/wordcount.c...](https://github.com/brool/hadoop- shim/blob/master/wordcount.clj)</comment>


Known Issue: Charged full price of Fi device after financing - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/fi/thread/5490725 <comment><USER2> Google Fi seems to have largely failed in achieving any meaningful goals. It had some promise early on, but its value proposition is pretty thin. Main points against:

1) Has fallen into the same trap of subsidizing expensive phones and phone plans over long periods and other rubbish discount deals for signing up (used to be the much hated contract model earlier with other carriers, but this is not very different) 2) Not a real carrier in a standards compliant way (or at least there is no open reference implementation). Needs play services blobs to do anything intelligent 3) Needs google account 4) Mucks up google voice 5) Not really price competitive for data

The only real thing going for it at the moment is roaming benefits. Once other carriers undercut that, what remains ? It anyway has low name recognition and no retail presence.

<comment><USER3> It works for me quite well, but that's because I'm almost always roaming. The experience of being able to have a pocket full of data SIMs at no code is great. Mostly I never see it, or think about it, it just works. Though honestly I'm sort of concerned for when it suddenly doesn't.

<comment><USER4> The same-rate international data is what keeps me on Fi. It's great not to have to worry about taking it in the shorts by the phone company when traveling somewhere. A friend of mine has one of the majors as his carrier and they were charging him $10/day for data in Europe, in 2019 that's just insane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> King-Aaron This could easily cripple people on low incomes. Not good enough for a company the size of Google.

<comment><USER5> > This could easily cripple people on low incomes.

To keep this in perspective, Google Fi costs substantially more than every other phone plan unless you travel internationally on a regular basis.

<comment><USER6> I pay around $35/month, is that substantially more than every other phone plan? I am planning to switch off in the future though, for whatever privacy gains are possible through avoiding Google.

<comment><USER7> That sounds like 1.5GB of data/month? You can probably beat that with a MVNO, but not any of the main US carriers. Extreme example being like mint mobile which does bulk purchases (3,6,12months) and goes down as cheap as $15/month for 3GB of LTE.

If you have Comcast home internet, you might be able to use Xfinity Mobile (only BYOP for iPhone atm but they do have a few $100 backs for some phones on their site). It costs $0 for calling/text and $12/gig.

<comment><USER5> T-mobile is $40 per month with unlimited data, and $30 per month if you have 4+ lines.

<comment><USER8> The only single line unlimited plan I see at T-Mobile is $70/month.

<comment><USER9> You can easily find 3 other people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The data's too expensive on Fi. It's worth it for roaming but I'm dual-SIMing AT&T in New York because why pay overage rates for basic?

I love having the service but financially I hope they sort some of this stuff out. It could attract more people, too.

</comment><comment><USER11> Lots of angry people in the comments. Apparently it did affect a number of them quite badly.

What seems strange to me, (and not judging it's just a little weird) are the amount of people hit up for $900-$1000 phones that are overdrawn or cannot buy gas etc because of this event. And certainly that can be a big surprise charge but you still have to pay the $1000 over time, what's wrong with a $250 phone?

Maybe I'm a cheapo who only buys $250 phones and so doesn't understand how much better the $1000 ones are. But if things are that tight it just doesn't seem like the most logical thing to spend extra money on. Even future money a bit at a time. Probably there are reasons I don't understand.

<comment><USER8> Not sure why you got downvoted so much, you make a valid point, like maybe this guy shouldn't have bought a thousand dollar phone:

 _Google, because of your ADMITTED MISTAKE, my rent check on Monday is now going to bounce. I very well could get evicted from my house over this. What is your plan to make sure I do not get evicted, or is Google going to pay for a new place for me to rent if this happens?_

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure what any of this has to do with Google charging the full amount despite these people being on payment plans. It wouldn't be acceptable for any other provider to do this and it isn't acceptable for Google. The state of these peoples' finances makes this worse, and doesn't absolve Google. It's incredible the mental gymnastics well-off people will do to shift the blame to the poor instead of the weak, vulnerable billion dollar enterprises that fuck up.

This guy took the payment plan according to what he thought was able to pay monthly. And until Google charged him $1000 out of nowhere, that was fine. That's all there is to it.

<comment><USER8> I agree that Google screwed up big time but if you let the cost of your phone get you evicted (even if unexpected), you've made a bad financial decision.

<comment><USER13> You keep talking about getting kicked out by the landlord which no one here even mentioned except you in the entire HN thread. "The cost of the phone" leads to additional late fees and in some rare cases to debt collectors harassing you. Suddenly a small $1000 charge that you can pay off next month turns into $1200 and you might pay additional fees to the debt collectors even if their claim is invalid just to get them off your back. Google could also just refuse to hand out refunds at all because they got your money and their law department is bigger than whatever defense you can get and you will lose more money in legal fees than you could possibly recover. Bonus points if they keep charging the monthly payments despite you paying the full price. (congratulations your $1000 phone is now $2000, "plan" better next time)

<comment><USER8> I posted an actual quote from someone claiming that this could lead to eviction from someone that posted on the Google blog page, I didn't make it up out of thin air.

Google should refund all direct costs (NSF fees, etc) but they shouldn't be responsible for rehousing someone that was evicted.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


This Christmas, give the gift of a blameless life to someone you love - <AUTHOR> http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2015/12/this-christmas-give-gift-of-blameless.html <comment><USER2> I genuinely can't tell whether this is a spoof, or is real.

If it's a spoof, I have to give credit: it is masterfully done. If it is real, then they should probably work a little harder on trying not to sound like a spoof.

<comment><USER3> It's a humor piece that attempts to get us to think about the issue. The quote is invented. The product is not real. But the ideas are -- hopefully -- thought provoking one.

EDIT. As user tremon noted, there is a word for this: the piece is _satire_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The CaaS (Confession as a Service) space is certainly heating up.

And no wonder. The Catholic Church has been giving absolution away for centuries, but what if you're not Catholic? Or what if you want a luxury/premium reconciliation experience, rather than the standard shuffle into a cramped, dark confessional booth on a Saturday afternoon?

The time is definitely ripe for disruption. Can't wait for the mobile app.

<comment><USER5> The presence of God's grace in the holy sacrament of Penance is what gives it a "luxury/premium" quality regardless of the physical environment. An app, which does not confer God's grace, can never be "luxury/premium" for this reason and can not "disrupt" the sacrament.

<comment><USER6> Parent is making a joke, but surely God can be present through an app, if he so chooses?

<comment><USER5> From the perspective of the Catholic faith, God can do whatever He pleases provided it's logical and consistent with His past promises. While God could decide to grant the pardon and grace of the sacrament through an app, the Church expects the Holy Spirit would inform us of such a decision. It also seems highly unlikely since it would be antithetical to the theological premise of Penance, in which the humility required to confess your sins directly to another human is central.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I seriously disagree with this ( _assuming its not a joke, or that some people wont read it as such_ ).

We live in an intensely interconnected world, and although its challenging to unpick those connections, to not do so is to become complicit in all manor of frankly very bad shit.

We only get to vote once every 4 or 5 years, but every time you spend (or earn) a dollar or pound, you are contributing to a system, you are channeling money in a particular direction.

Giant corporations have, without any need for anyone to plan it, slowly accumulated more and more power to themselves. e.g. check up on the series of judgements that were used to grant them personhood. They now stomp about the planet like huge immortal toddlers, with little oversight and not much in the way of conscience.

If you dont care, then fine. But if you do care dont let articles like this tell you not to bother.

And yes ethical consumption is complicated. A good starting point is to assume everything is tainted unless you know otherwise. And although none of the supposed 'good' ways are straightforward (there are complex arguments around Fair Trade, Organic etc), you should never let the perfect become the enemy of the good. That is, dont be pit off from trying to do one thing right just because you can't do everything right.

Buying stuff secondhand where possible is a good default position I find (although there are debates around that as well)

<comment><USER8> I would call it satire, i.e. putting a humourous spin on a serious subject. But I will respond to your post in a serious manner nonetheless.

Your second sentence perfectly illustrates the point the article is trying to make, that "the increasing moralisation of mundane choices is strongly associated with the phenomenology of interminable inescapable guilt". As the article argues, when we overload our moral judgements by making every single act a moral deliberation, one measurable effect will be an overall lessening of our moral convictions.

Yes, you only vote a few times every odd years. No, your tax dollars are not "channeled in a particular direction". Yes, business interests are still fundamentally at odds with environmental concerns. No, the few pennies you spend on products of a particular business do not affect the business' behaviour. The amount of moral deliberation that is reasonable to "demand" for such a simple act should be proportional to the ratio of your expenditure versus the entire business size.

> And yes ethical consumption is complicated. A good starting point is to > assume everything is tainted unless you know otherwise

I don't think this is a useful starting point. If you start by assuming everything is tainted, you are already making a moral judgement about every purchase. Judgements and decisions cost mental energy, and we already know that mental energy is not infinite.

> That is, dont be pit off from trying to do one thing right just because you > can't do everything right.

But that is exactly what's happening subconciously anyway: if we perceive (some of) our morals to be untenable (because of unrealistic demands, no way to actually make an impact, or general information/decision overload), that causes us to weaken all of our morals, even the ones we can affect.

Pick your battles, is what I'd take from this. And when evangelizing a cause, make sure the burden you're placing on others is realistic.

<comment><USER7> I'm not talking about tax dollars. I'm talking about peoples personal spending decisions.

 _No, the few pennies you spend on products of a particular business do not affect the business ' behaviour._

Thats patently false. Its a small effect obviously, but its an effect. You could argue that recyling household waste is pointless from the same logic (and people do, I know)

<comment><USER8> Well, patently false... I think individual actions are negligible. In order to have an effect, you need a concerted effort from many people. I realise there's a chicken-and-egg problem here, because such efforts start with individual actions and need to gain critical mass from there.

I did not mean to say that such causes are futile. However, care should be taken that moral appeals are targeted and realistic, or they risk defeating both themself and other appeals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm confused by the people who are confused whether this is satire, but (like most good satire) it raises valid points.

Being "moral" in how we live our day-to-day lives is _complicated_ , and it would be great if we could somehow offload some of that complexity. We already do this to an extent with organizations that track the effectiveness of various kinds of charitable giving- CharityWatch, for instance. Along the lines of the article, something that monitors your purchases and lets you know things like "that brand uses child labor, this alternative is okay" or "this meat was obtained with an estimated ecological impact of $1.0245/kg" would really be _useful_ (if only in a "now I don't have to google everything to feel safe" sense.) There's a real-live potential blockbuster app in that (if only because, aside from everything else, it would have lots of interesting info about your purchasing habits...)

</comment><comment><USER10> The guilt machine has gotten so efficient, indulgences are looking like a desirable possibility.

<comment><USER11> And why not? Catholic indulgences were about making God feel good about you. This is more about making _you_ feel good about you, which is already a huge market.

<comment><USER10> Indulgences were always about making you feel good about you. The Catholic Church merely took some money for the privilege.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Related: [http://www.oxfam.org.uk/shop/oxfam- unwrapped](http://www.oxfam.org.uk/shop/oxfam-unwrapped) already exists; [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/04/ethics- offsets/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/04/ethics-offsets/) explores some of the (creepy) implications of ethics offsets.

<comment><USER13> Honestly one of the biggest reasons I don't donate more is I fucking hate how much junk mail and spam I get as a result. Oxfam has been sending us two or three letters a month for years. I wish there was some way to anonymously donate to charities, so they wouldn't ever receive any contact information for me. Maybe send them paper cash in the mail or something......

<comment><USER14> I recommend networkforgood.org. They give you the choice of how much of your personal information to share with the receiving charity. Since my dad died I sometimes donate in his name to his favorite charity, and I don't have to give them so much as an email address. Network for Good has never spammed me, either.

<comment><USER13> Thank you for the recommendation, I will check it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This was fantastic. These are the kinds of articles that I read HN for. Keep up the great work Internet!

</comment><comment><USER16> _John Stuart Mill 's ghost high fives Jeremy Bentham's UC London corpse_

</comment><comment><USER17> Bypass all the middlemen, order now! [http://reserveaspotinheaven.com/](http://reserveaspotinheaven.com/)

</comment><comment><USER18> So somebody figured out a startup idea from ancient Catholic policy? I'm actually quite amazed that somebody didn't think up the idea of a secular indulgence system before!

I sincerely hope this is a joke.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've already purchased several indulgences from the church.

Fuck what Marten Luther had to say on this.... I'm all set!

</comment><comment><USER20> He forgot to mention the unethical practice of extreme consumerism.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great to read this here.

</comment><comment><USER22> Unbelievable... I sincerely hope it's a joke.

<comment><USER23> "As part of our own commitment to making the world a better place 10% of our profits go to providing blankets, electronic journal access and dental insurance to unemployed moral philosophy phds."

I don't think so, this guys are here for real!</comment></comment>


Why is this Go faster than the equivalent Java? - <AUTHOR> http://www.boyter.org/2017/03/golang-solution-faster-equivalent-java-solution/ <comment><USER3> The moment I saw the problem I started coding :-)

[https://gist.github.com/depp/3a6f0377284fbb9b33984063856051b...](https://gist.github.com/depp/3a6f0377284fbb9b33984063856051b1)

Rather than brute forcing all possible permutations, we start from all possible final states and BFS backwards towards starting states. There are probably tons of opportunities for further optimization, but this takes ~800 ms on my desktop, and it only uses one core. We don't need to track the number of turns required to end each state, since the frontier will always consist of games which require the same number of turns to end.

Edit: Shrinking my data structures dropped runtime by 50%, and easy & cheap parallelism dropped runtime by another 75% on my four-core desktop. New runtime: 110ms (Intel i5 6600k). The key to the parallelism is that since the total amount of money never changes, we can assign a different total amount of money to each thread, and they'll never have to search the same states.

<comment><USER4> Wow, this is beautiful C++ code! High level abstractions, not hiding any of the nitty gritty details, parallelism and all, yet very readable. Well done!

<comment><USER5> I felt the same - not that worse than in a modern language (of course someone should rewrite in Go with the new algorithm so we can decide if it would be good enough :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Epilogue:

> EDIT - Thanks to Dolda2000 I have modified the Java version. It is now about > the same speed as the GoLang version. Indeed the issue was the the games > were created causing the Java version to have to simulate more games to > determine if the game went long enough. With the changes it is running in > about ~6 seconds now and has restored my faith in Java.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43082115/why-is-this- gola...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43082115/why-is-this-golang- solution-faster-then-the-equivalent-java-solution)

<comment><USER7> This is great, this comment deserves to be at the top. Let's not criticize the original article, and instead celebrate that its publication resulted in a crowdsourced solution. I love to see the community coming together to provide knowledge to us all. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love this sort of post, and it makes me miss programming (i'm a Linux sysadmin type now)

The golden age of this stuff was when I was writing stuff for the Atari ST and Amiga. Fixed hardware, manuals that came with assembly instructions and timings, etc.

My greatest moment was when rewriting the Atari ST text output function. For those that don't remember, the ST had an interleaved bitmap [1] and no hardware blitter support, so everything was done with the CPU. Therefore writing text on the screen was hard. I wrote a program that speeded up the C code from the OS about 3x, then Darek Mihocka with Quick ST [2] beat my speedup. I was absolutely aggrieved about this, but spent weeks working out how he did it without any luck.

In the end the solution came to me genuinely when I was dreaming - <USER2> Motorola 68000 move.p instruction which worked quite well with the interlaced bitmap. It gave me a nearly 2x speedup and the rest of the optimisations I had meant I beat his code.

I do miss those days of a level playing field where the outcome was the result of your skills, rather than quibbling over the middleware, OS, graphics driver version used, etc etc.

[1] [http://codetapper.com/amiga/maptapper/documentation/gfx/gfx-...](http://codetapper.com/amiga/maptapper/documentation/gfx/gfx- mode/)

[2] [http://www.atariuptodate.de/en/3907/quick- st](http://www.atariuptodate.de/en/3907/quick-st)

<comment><USER9> How is that working out for you? Isn't the pay significantly less being a sysadmin?

<comment><USER10> It's illusory to think that we have a choice. It's hard to avoid becoming obsolete over a long timespan.

<comment><USER9> I am a bit confused about what you are referring to. Are you saying that we do not have many choices when it comes to work? I am about to graduate, but a lot of people seem to be saying that once you gain experience it is easy to hop to different jobs.

<comment><USER11> After a while you get pigeonholed. You can hop jobs easily but it is the same shit, different name on the building. It is often easier to pivot inside a company then jump to a new company.

<comment><USER12> Personally I would appreciate when those who got pigeonholed into finding their consecutive jobs "the same sh*t" don't foreshadow that onto those yet to graduate. It's good that those coming into the job market newly know what to look out for, but the opportunities mentioned by the previous poster also mean that you can steer away from such shotty (I'm going with the auto-complete here) jobs... if you choose so.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. I've been a sysadmin, tech support nerd, developer, architect and now product manager. With each switch the value you bring jumps.

Next switch is likely starting a business.

37 y.o., still not tired of this!

I can see how someone could get bitter if they stayed in the same role/position most of their career, but in my experience this has tended to be people with a negative outlook/attitude/chip on shoulder in general... It really is what you make of it, people are people wherever you go, some are dicks, some are not.

Just accept the reality of the game and deal with it.

You don't need to spread your aura of doom everywhere you go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> tl;dr: The Go implementation being faster has nothing to do with Java or Go. The version implemented in Go used a slightly different algorithm, which allowed hot inner loops to terminate early, greatly improving the performance of the algorithm.

<comment><USER15> I like Go, but it's not dramatically faster than Java. Any contest between the two of them will probably just be a back and forth of optimizations. They share pretty much the same upper bound.

<comment><USER16> Given a specific machine with a set amount of cpu, ram, and io bandwidth, I find I can easily do more on that machine with go than java.

Also, try running multiple java processes on a machine as opposed to multiple go programs.

<comment><USER15> So could I. I imagine a Java aficionado would say the opposite. Like I said, different ways to think about the problem.

<comment><USER17> To the posters point about running multiple Java aaps on a single machine, I think ram is the real issue. Java makes in my experience far less frugal use of it. I've seen Java applications eat hundreds of mbs of ram rewritten in Go using 1-2 mb.

<comment><USER15> Every time I hear this conversation play out, the Java folks point out that the GC is highly tunable/pluggable, so you can shift some levers and get lower memory consumption in exchange for more frequent collections. I'm not a GC expert, so I'm just repeating what I've heard.

<comment><USER18> This is true. The Java GC (and the whole VM) is one of thr most impressive pieces of software in existence. There are several GCs available, they're tunable, and they support monitoring better than any other I've seen.

No GC I know is happy without a heap several times larger than the program's requirements.

OTOH, Java programs tend to be built using frameworks that soak up memory like crazy. So there's that.

<comment><USER19> I believe that Go's GC currently bounds heap memory usage to 2x the actual usage (worst case).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm surprised the warmup problem in Java hasn't been invoked here yet. Java has bootstrap and warm-up overhead which for comparisons like this one may have a decisive impact on the perceived results.

What will happen is (after the JVM starts), there will be (by default) 10000 interpreted iterations, then shortly after that a stop-the-world pause to replace slow interpreted code with its native counterpart JITed by a compiler thread, and probably a few more of those either optimising other, less hot parts of the code, or applying more aggressive optimizations on already JITed sections.

Go comes with AOT compilation and as far as I know, doesn't have much initial overhead. For a test that takes few seconds to complete, I'd say this is not how you want to compare performance.

<comment><USER21> There is no stop the world point. There are compilation threads always running in the background patching hot code.

In Java 8 tiered compilation became the default. After a first threshold is reached, a method or loop will be compiled as a first approximation with further record keeping. At the second threshold, a more aggressively optimized version without record keeping will be put in place. This is kind of like the merging of the old C1 and C2 compilers into one to help get up to speed quicker.

When you want to measure this stuff you use JMH, Java Microbenchmarking Harness, an amazing piece of work that will warmup the JVM before executing performance tests. Be very careful writing your own Java timing code, and for the most part rely on JMH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I seem to be missing the point or lesson of the post?

Speed comparison between two languages, botched the Java algorithm... and ...?

<comment><USER23> And the final result was that the two languages had roughly the same performance, which may surprise folks that believe Java is still a slow language.

<comment><USER24> It hasn't been slow since basically 1.3 when HotSpot became default.

<comment><USER25> Urban legends tend to live forever.

<comment><USER26> I think that there is probably a large overlap between the population of people who believe this and the population of people that don't really know what bytecode or JIT compilation are.

In fact, I have asked a number of people under the impression that Java is slow to explain why they think it is slow. The answers have two flavors:

1\. Its high level abstractions are computationally expensive. Sometimes this idea is supported by saying that garbage collection is very slow, sometimes by saying that the inability to directly manage memory means that it is done inefficiently, perhaps even inescapably so.

2\. Compiling a program to an intermediary language that is not assembly but must be instead executed by something else (in this case, the JVM) must be slow.

<comment><USER27> Controlling memory layout is one area that is very important for performance, where Java does not exactly shines. You essentially have to store your data in arrays of primitive types, to avoid memory overhead of objects (pointer to class, lock, gc bits) and additional indirection during access. While not exactly impossible, Java makes it quite inconvenient and costly to write code that takes control of memory layout.

<comment><USER25> Hence why there are ongoing improvements targeted to Java 10, to change exactly that.

Until then there are the IBM and Azul extensions, off heap memory, or optimizing in native code that 1% after using the profiler, where it really matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Just for the sake of having another solution for the same problem, here's the basically-zero-thought-required brute-force search solution in C: [https://gist.github.com/arirahikkala/ef1a07dbd5a8ca3a077c03c...](https://gist.github.com/arirahikkala/ef1a07dbd5a8ca3a077c03c3f4efcfde)

Not as fast as dietrichepp's solution, but not terrible either, and probably the winner in terms of memory use. Since there's no state to keep track of, adding parallelism with OpenMP was trivial, too.

</comment><comment><USER29> Wouldn't it be possible to reduce the number of input combinations to all combinations where the proportion of money for each player is the same? For example (1,4,6) should give the same result as (2,8,12), but with different scaling-factor.

Find all random games for those proportions which end after 12 turns, then change the scaling factor to make it less than 255?

</comment><comment><USER30> The article says he doesn't buy that Java is slow. But the JVM is a JIT with a pretty significant warm-up time. Its designed for long running processes, and if you only doing things that are running for a couple seconds, then yes, Java is slow. Java becomes fast only after it's been running for a while.

<comment><USER31> The article is a counterexample to your claim. The Go program and the Java program ran in effectively the same amount of time.

I made this point in more detail upthread, but: for some CLI tasks that need to run in a few seconds, JVM performance will be adequate. For others, it will suffer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I get the sense that the author doesn't know about algorithmic complexity. This has nothing to do with language choice and everything to do with the algorithms used.

<comment><USER26> I, on the other hand, get the feeling from reading the article that the author understands that this performance difference was due to implementation differences, but wanted a more attention-grabbing title.

My subjective impression is that this is the first time the author has come across this sort of consideration in implementation and wanted to write about it. There is nothing wrong with that - in fact, I think it's great! It's just that the title leads one to expect, well, quite a bit more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not the first time but the first time in a while and the first time I have ever written about the process. I was literally just writing down my experience post event.

The title was just taken from the Stackoverflow post which I agree in this context is a little click baity.

I never expected it to get this much attention though, as stated in the first sentence it was just something I did for myself more than anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The HN title doesn't match TFA title. HN has a grammatical error.

<comment><USER34> Yes! Fixed. Sorry, we usually don't miss those for that long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The title is misleading in a way making it a click bait. The article is cool, though. Both languages are equally fast.

</comment><comment><USER36> That problem is that type of problem that is well suited for a prolog system with a constraint library.

<comment><USER37> Some of these types of problems can indeed be turned over to a constraint solver. I'd love to see a comparison with Prolog. Has anybody tried it?

The problem that I see with Prolog in this case is that a simple solution is simple because it is turning the search over to Prolog's built in constraint solver that knows nothing of the problem. This often leads to unacceptable performance with Prolog; performance problems can sometimes be addressed in practice by the appropriate placement of the cut operator within the logical specification of the constraints. This, at least in my experience, makes understanding what the program is doing very difficult.

Generally, I view Prolog (along with languages like Smalltalk) as a language appropriate for some problem domains that have come to the _end of their lifetime_ because mainline, more generally useful, languages have adopted their features or incorporated them in libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> faster then?

</comment><comment><USER39> Than

</comment><comment><USER40> Capitalization of `GoLang` should actually be `golang`.

It's also not automatic that golang is strictly faster than well tuned java vms.</comment>


Ask HN: In your product startup how do you ensure timely feature delivery? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> We're not a startup, but what helped us nail delivery down is actively choosing between releasing feature sets or releasing on a schedule. You can't realistically get both. If you can, having a rolling release every two weeks that includes everything that's gone through Q&A means you have constant progress, no matter how slow it is. The other end of the spectrum is digging your head down until you get a set of features out and doing a release once that's done. Having constant rolling releases relieves your team of a lot of unnecessary pressure and is also a roundabout safeguard against feature-creep. I'm aware it doesn't work for a lot contexts, but if you can make it work, it's great.

</comment><comment><USER3> On a long enough timescale there will be difficulty meeting all deadlines. People leave jobs, coronavirus interrupts, force majeure, motivation goes down, the task on hand is underestimated etc.. these will all be learning curves that will help refine your time guesstimates and hopefully predict better.</comment>


William Binney: 80% of audio calls are recorded and stored in the US - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/11/the-ultimate-goal-of-the-nsa-is-total-population-control/ <comment><USER2> _" At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US. This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores."_

I think he meant that the NSA had access to the 80% of calls that are routed through the US, not the the NSA is recording and storing literally every single one of them. I think he was misquoted or misspoke.

William Binney hasn't worked for the NSA since 2001. Were they recording all calls back then? Did someone still there leak new information to him?

<comment><USER3> the techy in me is greatly impressed that can do this.

the libertarian in me is greatly annoyed they can do this.

<comment><USER4> Please don't politicize civil liberties. If progressives and libertarians can come together on anything, it's this.

<comment><USER5> "All cats are libertarians. Completely dependent on others but fully convinced of their own independence."

<comment><USER6> Good joke, but sort of backfires!

Aren't cats notoriously good at surviving in the wild? Both feral and domestic cats (if they have to).

<comment><USER7> Not around here. Cats are great meals for coyotes, foxes, birds of prey, feral hogs... The list goes on and on. But don't tell a cat that and burst their bubble!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We're staring at the gradual but deliberate end of privacy and its scary. The large majority of the world's population either doesn't know or care how significant or dangerous this trend is, and those few who do will find their way into surveillance databases because they act "suspiciously" by encrypting their communications and guarding their privacy.

I don't see a powerful enough counterforce against this insidious trend anywhere around the world. "Inspired" by the US, other countries are joining a competitive surveillance race stoked by private corporations selling everything from GSM monitoring to big data.

</rant>

<comment><USER9> More or less, yes. However, the danger is really only to people outside the safe herd majority who might draw the wrong sort of attention. So I don't see it being a huge danger.

However, I don't think it'll ever devolve to the point where mass arrests or anything truly draconian takes place. There isn't any need in Democracy. You need to only control 51% of the engaged voters [e.g. the people who actually vote] and at least in the US the two party system controls that quite effectively.

I'm worried about this because it will lead to people getting stepped on and crushed between the massive gears of the "State Security" apparatus.

<comment><USER10> Problem is the next governments will inherit the surveillance system. Who says they won't be fascists and/or turn the country into dictatorship ? When this happens, we might see these mass arrests. A lot can change in only a few decades.

<comment><USER9> I've seen that argument before but honestly...

What would stop them from building it themselves if they were elected?

Nothing, really.

<comment><USER11> It's much easier and faster to use existing infrastructure than having to build a new one.

<comment><USER9> Obviously. However, speed isn't relevant since you can't erase your fingerprints of your entire life on the internet.

> You can use this argument when you can wipe out all copies of a nude woman > whose ex posted her to imgur or something. Until then, you are just 100% > wrong because you know you can't do what you claim.

That is really what it boils down to. You can't erase all of the evidence on the internet, so you are screwed anyway.

I think the most amusing part of this is the fact I basically agree with the comment I responded to except to the severity and scope of the danger.

Vulnerable people will get screwed. Most people won't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The story in the _Guardian_ by Antony Loewenstein certainly reports that William Binney's personal opinion as a former employee of NSA is that NSA is gathering up and recording whatever it can and that NSA has a "totalitarian mentality." That is a very important issue, if true, but it is at least debatable that NSA is really that thorough in its actual practices and really that generally blatant in disregarding the civil rights of Americans or even of people in other countries. For one thing, Binney also points to NSA intelligence failures in the same article, and if NSA is missing major activities of other countries (the Russian intervention in Ukraine) and nonstate terrorist groups (the "Islamic State" capture of much territory in Iraq), then surely NSA doesn't have the time and resources to analyze all of the data it gathers, and maybe it is not gathering as much data as some people claim.

Several comments posted before I read all those comments and read the fine article write about NSA blackmailing politicians. I don't believe NSA blackmail can or will happen in general, for reasons I have mentioned before here on HN. One of the most common kinds of comments here on Hacker News about issues like this is a comment that ASSUMES that if government leaders are under pervasive surveillance they are all afraid of blackmail. But I don't believe that, because some government leaders and some political candidates are essentially shameless. Even after they are caught (by old-fashioned journalism, or by a jilted lover or some unrelated criminal investigation) doing something unsavory, they are still willing to run for office, and SOME ARE REELECTED. United States Senator David Vitter was reelected in 2010 even after a scandal involving behavior that I would consider shameful,[1] and the antics of former DC mayor Marion Barry[2] are probably still notorious enough that they don't need further discussion here. In short, I call baloney on the idea that NSA can keep politicians on its leash simply by knowing their secrets. Some politicians have PUBLIC lives full of dirt, and still get elected and influence policy anyway.

The other reason I don't believe this HN hivemind theory of politics is that I by no means assume that everyone in politics lacks personal integrity. Some politicians, I am quite sure, could have all their secrets revealed only to have voters think "Why is that person such a straight-arrow? Why not have some fun once in a while?" The simple fact is that there is value system diversity in the United States electorate, and there is personal conduct probity variance among United States politicians, and there isn't any universal way to unduly influence politicians merely through even the most diligent efforts to discover personal secrets. If politicians think that NSA is going too far (as evidently several politicians from more than one party do think), then they will receive plenty of support from the general public to rein in the surveillance. (Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I am a lawyer, who as a judicial clerk for my state's Supreme Court used to review case files on attorney misconduct, and, yes, some of my law school classmates are elected officials, including one member of Congress. I am absolutely certain that there are enough politicians ready to mobilize to roll back NSA surveillance programs if they really think the programs are excessive in their scope.)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Vitter#D.C._Madam_scanda...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Vitter#D.C._Madam_scandal)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry#1990_arrest_.26_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry#1990_arrest_.26_drug_conviction)

<comment><USER13> That is an incredibly weak argument.

First of all, whether they are shameless or not doesn't really matter. If sexually explicit pictures of a politician end up on the internet, his reputation takes damage. It's beyond his control. Plenty of politicians are willing to go to great lengths to avoid this. So what does it matter if he's shameless or not?

Second of all, politicians and other powerful people might have something to hide that isn't just embarrassing but is also illegal. It's certainly not beyond the capabilities of the NSA to target powerful people that oppose the NSA while ignoring those that support them.

For example, in the news you might read about a CEO that gets convicted of insider trading. Nothing to worry about, right? Well, what if the NSA purposefully targeted him because they don't like whatever it is he's doing? Using parallel construction, it wouldn't even have links to the NSA.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Weiner_sexting_scandal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Weiner_sexting_scandals)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio)

<comment><USER14> Nacchio was convicted of running a pump-and-dump insider trading scam that netted him ~$100MM at the expense of common public shareholders. If there's an award for "most obnoxious implication of NSA's wrongdoing", it should go to the attempted rehabilitation of people like Nacchio.

Here's the indictment. It's quite straightforward.

[http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2007/0307...](http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2007/0307/20070307_030947_nacchio_indictment.pdf)

Here's the cliff notes:

"No later than December 4, 2000, through and including September 10, 2001, NACCHIO was aware of material, non-public information about Qwest's business, including, but not limited to" [litany of distressing concerns about Qwest's bottom line which ultimately proved dispositive in valuing Qwest].

Note the date.

Now, look at this table of Nacchio's stock sales:

[http://oi60.tinypic.com/2n1tgr6.jpg](http://oi60.tinypic.com/2n1tgr6.jpg)

Nacchio claims to have believed that secret national security government contracts were going to rescue Qwest from their financial problems (note the implicit concession that Qwest had problems from which its financials needed to be rescued). One tie-in between Nacchio and NSA is the notion that by refusing requests from NSA, Nacchio lost those contracts. _Stipulate that this is true_ ; it's a plausible complaint. Nacchio _still took the money and ran_.

<comment><USER15> Of course an indictment is going to make the indicted sound like scum. It's not exactly an unbiased document.

The pertinent questions in the Nacchio case are P(insider trading), P(getting caught), and P(getting caught | rejected NSA).

<comment><USER14> I don't see any pertinent question other than P(insider trading), which sure looks a lot like '1'.

<comment><USER15> P(insider trading | telecom CEO) is what I meant. Iff Nacchio was singled out for illegal but commonplace behavior, then it matters less to me what he did and more why he was the only one prosecuted. But if every insider trade has equal likelihood of getting caught, regardless of refusing NSA taps, then Nacchio is far less interesting.

<comment><USER14> I don't know if _every_ inside trader has an equal likelihood of being caught, but Nacchio's case appears to have been particularly brazen. The facts I presented aren't disputed: he sold over one hundred million dollars of stock in a time period where the future of his company was very much in doubt, taking advantage of information his company didn't share with common investors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The land of the free and the home of the brave. Indeed.

<comment><USER17> Hey, you make jokes but where did the Guardian relocate when the UK was preventing them from publishing leak-related stories?

<comment><USER18> The UK never claimed to be the land of the free. They willingly accept people doing jail time for offensive tweets and a host of other absurdities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If this is legal, is legality meaningless?

<comment><USER20> There are not a lot of things they are _not_ allowed to intercept, and it is very unclear (and classified!) what their interpretation of those rules are.

And then they break them sometimes anyway.

Same with GCHQ, really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Between at least 80% and 100% lies the possibility, that this figure is even closer to 100% than anyone would love to admit...

</comment><comment><USER22> _" Thank you for using the Influencing Machine. This call may be recorded for training purposes."_

</comment><comment><USER23> "The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control"

Scary shit...

<comment><USER24> So that they can do what, exactly? Once they get total population control what kind of stuff will they be able to do that they couldn't do before?

<comment><USER25> Make the world a better, safer place, as seen through the lens of the U.S. elite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why is this economically insane bullshit on HN? Who is assumes to pay for this?

</comment><comment><USER27> But here's the rub - who still uses audio calls? Its a point of deminishing intelligence. That's like saying that 80% of all 8-tracks are now in 1970 cars (as a statement in 2014). Its just not relevant.

<comment><USER28> Uh, essentially everyone? I have a small VoIP company and we were handling around a billion calls a week. You have a really terrible selection bias if you think people aren't using audio calls. In fact, audio calls are on the RISE because of easy and cheap international calling. We have clients that have customers that literally leave their phones open to their families 8 hours a day. Just on and walking around the house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> There have been at least 15-20 trillion constitutional violations

It is an amusing, even throwaway line, but it has a horrific message - the US administration is happy to sail so close to the line of totalitarianism that it will _possibly_ violate the constitution a trillion times. In the UK we jus found out similar legislation is unconstitutional and we are hurriedly writing another law to get round it. _sigh_

What happens when a country that really cares about it's constitution has to rush an amendment through or face civil rights violations from _everyone_?</comment>


Why not render posts at publication time rather than request time? - <AUTHOR> http://static.matthewlmcclure.com/s/2012/04/22/wasteful-computation.html <comment><USER2> Wasteful organization.

The post:

      http://static.matthewlmcclure.com/s/2012/04/22/wasteful-computation.html

One up, 404:

      http://static.matthewlmcclure.com/s/2012/04/22/

One up, 404:

      http://static.matthewlmcclure.com/s/2012/04/

One up, 404:

      http://static.matthewlmcclure.com/s/2012/

One up, something:

      http://static.matthewlmcclure.com/s/

Why do this? I understand the desire to organize, but why make bins with nothing in them? As it is, all he needs is /s/.

I would naturally expect .../2012/ to have either all the 2012 posts or all months that have posts, .../2012/04/ to have all of 2012's April posts or all days that have posts, etc. But not nothing.

</comment><comment><USER3> So we're back to Movable Type circa 2002? ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, we've discussed this before. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2945463>

I think the ubiquity and ease of use of things like WordPress causes people to overlook this solution. Also, I believe the caching plugins that people use with WordPress are doing something very similar.

There are a lot of static site/blog generators out there like Jekyll, but not many of them are targeted toward a general audience. WordPress is easy and well-known.

</comment><comment><USER5> Mainly because currently people's time > computation time.

Is it even worth my time to setup caching on a blog that gets 10 hits a day? Probably not.

</comment><comment><USER6> Publication time or request time doesn't matters, Varnish is in front.

</comment><comment><USER7> Because premature optimization is the root of all evil

</comment><comment><USER8> Every major blogging framework has caching either built in or as a plugin.</comment>


Why startup rules don't apply to Security Products - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@SamMyers/bridging-old-school-and-new-school-in-security-4180e855405a <comment><USER2> This is a timely piece for me after seeing and hearing thoughts from the YC side[0] and the practitioner side[1]. I'm of the belief that many security issues can't be innovated away like a stereotypical startup is funded to solve. There aren't any "products" to sell when many of the problems lie with the decision making processes at insecure organizations.

[0]: [https://twitter.com/sama/status/618883756774916096](https://twitter.com/sama/status/618883756774916096)

[1]: [http://www.cigital.com/silver- bullet/show-111/](http://www.cigital.com/silver-bullet/show-111/)</comment>


Best SSD Cloud Hosting Providers of 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://yon.fun/cheap-cloud-hosting-providers/ <comment><USER2> Referral link spam site basically.

<comment><AUTHOR> You sure?

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I looked through the site.

They're missing a ton of providers, its barely researched. You'd find like 100 more via WebHostingTalk that are probably better than the #1 choice.

Also the URL is a dead giveaway.</comment></comment></comment>


We just released our app: Ruzzit – Be first to discover new viral content - <AUTHOR> https://www.ruzzit.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Long time lurker, first time posting.

Here is the pitch: Ruzzit finds all the most viral stories on the web and categorises them into a single feed. We currently crawl 1.5k sources (websites, social channels etc) but hope to reach over 100k eventually.

There is currently no platform that aggregates all the internet's viral content in one feed. We want to be the first to do this well.

Also, with all this data we have, we are building different stats & analytics tools to help brands and agencies better understand and work with viral content.

Hope this makes sense! Any feedback welcome.</comment>


Infinit is a new simple file sharing app for OSX, using P2P - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/17/infinit/

<comment><USER2> Another centralized service, sadly. I've decided that whenever possible, I will seek out decentralized solutions instead.

Looking for a decentralized, peer-to-peer file sharing and synchronization solution? I've been using BitTorrent Sync as a replacement for Dropbox, and so far I've been very pleased with it. Unlimited storage, no 3rd-party servers involved, and less CPU usage and UI lag than Dropbox. Did I mention that it's free? Check it out: [http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html](http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html)

<comment><USER3> This is my list of P2P managed file transfer (and counting):

ShareFest: [http://www.sharefest.me/](http://www.sharefest.me/) and [https://github.com/peer5/sharefest](https://github.com/peer5/sharefest)

[https://www.getshareapp.com/v2](https://www.getshareapp.com/v2)

[http://www.jetbytes.com](http://www.jetbytes.com)

[http://host03.pipebytes.com/](http://host03.pipebytes.com/)

[http://www.filesovermiles.com/](http://www.filesovermiles.com/)

Similar thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5998630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5998630)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was an extremely similar attempt at this, worml [1] that failed dismally. While pretty enough, they never quite got the NAT transversal stuff nailed, so it looks like files are just uploaded in the clear to their server. Of course that's not mentioned on their website, but it's the behaviour I've previously observed.

[1]: [http://plantbasedapps.com/](http://plantbasedapps.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Sucks that it's still in a private beta. I wonder how long it takes for them to accept your invitation.

Also, for it would probably benefit from (if it already doesn't do it) giving some invitations so I can invite my friends to test it and use it. Otherwise I will not have anyone to test this with.

<comment><USER6> Disclaimer: I work for Infinit. Invitations will start being sent out in the next day or so. Each invitation comes with 3 invites so that you can begin sharing files with your friends. If you need more you can email support AT infinit DT io and we'll increase the number for you.

<comment><USER7> Might you have some idea of whenabouts Windows support will be arriving? I spend almost all my time with OS X, but some of the project partners are more Windows-based.

<comment><USER6> We're currently working on Windows. It should be done in a couple of months. In parallel, we're really making sure that the OS X application is solid. It's clear that this could be a constraint, but we'll do everything we can to push something out as soon as possible.

<comment><USER7> That's very good to hear! Thank you. Certainly, the current OS X offering does look beautifully refined - as simple as it ought to be, for the user, despite all the magic underneath.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Data Is Never Raw - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-data-is-never-raw <comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18735492](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18735492)

</comment><comment><USER3> Related: I've been trying to get away from describing data as "dirty", which among other things, implies that there is an obviously better "clean" state for the data. I think it better to call data "complicated", and rather than cleaning it, we have ways to simplify it for processing.

<comment><USER4> Have 100,000 people enter there address with a text field for the state and get back to me with how many states there are.

<comment><USER5> 50 states, probably. ;)

Edit: assuming a very US-centric dataset...

<comment><USER6> 50 states, represented probably 500 different ways... full names, partial names, abbreviations, abbreviations with dots, abbreviations with dots and extra spaces, different cases...

<comment><USER7> That data happens to take the form of human input. In that case the different ways in which participants choose to enter their address is part of what you are collecting. It does not suggest that the data is raw or dirty, you just gathered superfluous information as a side effect of your methodology. I think it is better described as overly complicated.

If the problem were the opposite it would also make sense to say that the data is too simple rather than too clean. That gets to what the article is saying; that all data collection is inherently biased.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If someone hired me a data scientist and I said: "Can you help me process this raw data into something that we can work with in this tensorflow model?" And they reply with:

"Don't call it Raw Data"

I would ask my manager to get me someone else.</comment>


First glimpse of another universe - <AUTHOR> https://qubitsnews.com/2015/10/28/first-glimpse-of-another-universe/ <comment><USER2> [2015]</comment>


Testing WireGuard with an early-adopter VPN service - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/testing-wireguard-with-an-early-adopter-vpn-service/ <comment><USER2> I stood up WireGuard on my server this past weekend, and I am totally stoked about it. In fact, I am turning off OpenVPN on it at this very moment. It was stupid easy to turn up.</comment>


The "S" Stands for "Simple" - <AUTHOR> http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-stands-for-simple/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is old, but I thought it was great. I'm just glad suds exists (<https://fedorahosted.org/suds/>) for when I do have to deal with SOAP (Amazon's Fulfillment Web Services, primarily).</comment>


Turkish police seize 1.4 kg of radioactive californium in Ankara - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailysabah.com/investigations/2018/03/19/turkish-police-seize-radioactive-californium-element-in-ankara <comment><USER2> Article mentions seizure of red mercury ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury)) which suggests that either the writer is incredibly misinformed or this is an intentional disinfo piece.

<comment><USER3> _Everything_ in the article suggests that it's either moronic clickbait (FB tier) or disinformation.

Implausible amounts of Californium, nonsense about red mercury, the bit about Al... it reeks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm also pretty skeptical about this story to be honest, but FWIW it was repeated by the BBC. [http://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-43463195](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43463195) The link I submitted is the nearest I can find to an original source.

The truth is probably either that a smaller amount of californium was seized (possibly 1.4g) or the californium was part of a 1.4kg assembly including some other elements.

<comment><USER3> 1.4 grams would be more than 4 years total world production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > radioactive Californium element worth $70 million

> with a worth of approximately $4 million per gram.

> The amount of seized Californium was reported as 1.441 kilograms.

I realize this isn't the important part of the article, but did the writer really not notice how bad they failed at basic math?

1,441 * $4M = ~$5.8 _billion_

<comment><USER5> Thanks for pointing this out, I'm from the Daily Sabah team and asked the editor of the article to make sure the numbers aren't off. The legit price of it is $4m/g, but apparently the guys were going to sell it for $70m on the black market. The article will be clarified.

<comment><USER3> Some other issues...

Red mercury doesn't exist.

Californium isn't used in nuclear warheads, it's a neutron source with a short half-life. As such it can be used to startup a reactor, or more typically in neutron diffraction spectroscopy.

1.4 kilos of Califorium? No.

 _Microgram quantities of californium-252 are available for commercial use through the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.[50] Only two sites produce californium-252: the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States, and the Research Institute of Atomic Reactors in Dimitrovgrad, Russia. As of 2003, the two sites produce 0.25 grams and 0.025 grams of californium-252 per year, respectively.[54]_

High purity aluminum is not controlled, is used in aerospace and electronics, and while it would have applications in enriching Uranium, so do concrete and steel.

The entire article is a farce.

<comment><USER6> To add to that, [https://www.metalary.com/californium- price/](https://www.metalary.com/californium-price/) says "Since the discovery of californium in 1950, scientists have only succeeded in producing just 8 grams of californium-252."

Wikipedia has a picture of the 50 ton container used to transport up to 1 gram of californium-252 safely, at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californium#/media/File:CfShie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californium#/media/File:CfShield.JPG) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > with a worth of approximately $4 million per gram > The amount of seized > Californium was reported as 1.441 kilograms. > The suspects reportedly > agreed to sell the element for $72 million.

Seems that some value is off. It should be worth $5,764 million. Selling something that worths $5 billion for just $72 million is a big discount.

<comment><USER8> I am guessing it's like "drug bust" numbers where they take the highest market price for a small amount, then multiply it by what they seized, ignoring the fact that larger size lots can have a much lower unit cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hard to believe. Worldwide production of Californium is just a few milligrams per year.

<comment><USER10> With most of that coming from Oak Ridge, where the resulting distribution is intensely scrutinized by the NRC. This is bull.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> >In 2016, police seized 13 nuggets of pure aluminum, a material used in nuclear energy production.

Anyone know more about this? I have pure aluminum in my pantry at home.

<comment><USER12> [https://www.google.se/amp/s/www.dailysabah.com/investigation...](https://www.google.se/amp/s/www.dailysabah.com/investigations/2016/02/11/man- in-possession-of-nuclear-material-destined-for-iran-detained/amp)</comment></comment>


The Economics of Oktoberfest - <AUTHOR> http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/10/the-economics-o.html <comment><USER2> Quite an interesting analysis... The explaination on revenue differences squaring off after a couple of years reflects the legacy that Oktoberfest has created...Incredible phenomenon that brings millions of people from diverse nationalities and cultures together year after year… (attended Oktoberfest in Hong Kong yesterday... but,the spirit of Munich is unparallel!!)</comment>


Most Extensive Reengineering of an Organism's Genetic Code Now Complete - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/most-extensive-reengineering-of-an-organism-s-genetic-code-now-complete/ <comment><USER2> I have odds that this will not work out the way they think it will.

"They can also be made entirely dependent on synthetic amino acids in their diets, to allay the fear that recoded bacteria could escape from a lab and wreak havoc in the wild."

I say this becasue of this well known experiment:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long- term_evolution_ex...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long- term_evolution_experiment)

Whether you accept the E. Coli long term evolution experiment as proof of evolution or not, it clearly does show at least the capacity for E. coli to figure out how to eat different things.

<comment><USER3> The difference between the long-term experiment and the OP one's here is that the E. coli could survive many, many generations since it was growing on a limited, but not depleted medium. The 'novel' bacteria in OP's text do not seem to have such a limited medium, they'd die in one generation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> see also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12314957](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12314957)</comment>


NSA Classifies Linux Journal Readers, Tor and Tails Linux Users as "extremists" - <AUTHOR> http://www.techspot.com/news/57316-nsa-classifies-linux-journal-readers-tor-and-tails-linux-users-as-extremists.html <comment><USER2> Previously

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12067696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12067696)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12053903](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12053903)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12052271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12052271)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7991696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7991696)</comment>


What's wrong with deep learning? (2015) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.pamitc.org/cvpr15/files/lecun-20150610-cvpr-keynote.pdf <comment><USER2> This was a long presentation. Yann gets to the issue in the title of the post about one third of the way through. The first third should probably be called "What's right with deep learning, or how DL works"...

For each problem, he explores some salient ideas or ways to address the issue.

TLDR:

* Theory: We don't always have good explanations for why it works.

* Reasoning: Stick a CRF on top of a Deep Net

* Memory: We need a "hippocampus". Memory networks, neural embeddings.

* Unsupervised Learning: How do we speed up inference in a generative model? Sparse autoencoders, sparse models...

For those who could use an overview of neural nets and how some of them work, this may be useful: [http://deeplearning4j.org/neuralnet- overview.html](http://deeplearning4j.org/neuralnet-overview.html)

<comment><USER3> What's a crf?

<comment><USER4> Conditional random field. It's a model that comes from the probabilistic/statistical side of ML, which was the "hot" ML area before deep learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is the video.

[http://techtalks.tv/talks/whats-wrong-with-deep- learning/616...](http://techtalks.tv/talks/whats-wrong-with-deep- learning/61639/)

<comment><USER6> Really excellent talk, thanks for posting the video! That was a dense presentation, absolutely jam packed with information and new papers and ideas. Anybody know of a 2016 version of this? I know CVPR and ICML just happened and I'm not sure their talks and presentations are up yet but this field is moving at absolutely lightning speed and I'd be interested to see updates on the techniques presented here.</comment></comment>